Persephone and Potatoes: Tilting Towards Winter on the Farm

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Fall tends to be a time for high drama.  We neglect to check the weather for 18 hours, and the predicted low for Wednesday night has dropped by 12 degrees (cue a scramble to re-cover dozens of beds that had lost row cover in the last windstorm). Days swing between lows in the low 20s and highs in the high 60's, and what can seem like the frozen end of the world in the morning is, a few hours later, a glorious harvest day--one in which we are simultaneously excited and exhausted.  

People have been asking us for at least a month whether we are “winding down” or “starting to button things up” or “wrapping up for the season.”  Depending on the mood we are in, and the task we are in the middle of, people may have gotten a laugh, a long list of everything we are still harvesting, or a snappy “No!  We are still working just as hard as ever!”  It’s a bit of overreaction, in any direction.  Some of that comes from the funny seasonal tension of being tired enough to be ready, in some ways, for things to slow down, to be done whether we like it or not. But at the same time we want just a little more time, a little more nice weather, to have one more shot at a goal we set way back in the dark of last winter, or just one more round of greens and cabbages. I drained the irrigation pump this week, and pulled the intake valve from our little lateral ditch that has now dried up.  I felt a familiar both-and pang, as I was pulled between the sadness of already missing the burbling of that ditch and the possibilities it brings for watering, warming, and keeping our whole farm alive in an arid climate--but also feeling the relief of knowing that it would be months before I would again be racing back to the pump house to restart the pump after a blown gasket, puzzling over where a leak might be, or laying face-down on the plank above the ditch, shoulder-deep in cold water, clearing the intake screen.  If we believe social media, it seems that all the other farmers we know are neatly wrapping up their seasons: garlic is planted and mulched, cover crops are lush and established, interns have been sent off with farewell parties, and the farmers are enjoying their drink of choice with their feet propped up by the woodstove.  
We are sometimes still so young and bumbling as a farm, despite the fact that SweetRoot will soon turn four.  Here we are, just maybe getting to our garlic next week, finally making the call that a fall-seeded cover crop won’t establish in time to be worth the effort by next spring, scrambling to put our row cover back onto those greens for the fourth time after a windstorm, and trying to figure out how to contain the husky who can now break out of the barn by jimmying the cat door.  Getting our last market harvest in as the temperature drops below freezing, even though we don't have quite the multiple truckloads to bring in that we did in the peak of the late summer season.  

For a while this morning, when the turnip leaves were frozen solid even under their two layers of cover, it felt like the end of the world.  This is part of my personal fall melodrama, enacted several times each year with the first big freezes, and Noah was graceful enough to just wait patiently for it to pass.  Because in fact many of our little tender-looking greens are so much tougher than they seem.  They thawed out, we harvested, spread leaves, and moved chickens to a new field block where they are perhaps the happiest they've ever been.  

As we find our way through the ups and downs of the days, seasons, and yearly rounds, we are so grateful to have you all on the ride along with us.  Please come out and celebrate the end of another market season tomorrow  (Saturday) morning. Though things were frozen this morning, and though it is the last market of the year, we will be bringing a wild abundance and hope that's ready to eat.

We'll have more eggs than I think we have ever brought, and plenty of advice on how to use them in good combination with the mountains of potatoes, greens including salad mix, Asian mix, arugula, baby kale, and baby spinach.  Onions, garlic, sweet peppers, hot chilies, cilantro, the last tomatoes (including some harvested today), winter squash, beets, carrots, cabbage, salad turnips, and more will join us for this final Saturday morning market.  We hope we'll see you there. 

-Mary and Noah

p.s.  If market doesn't work for your Saturday, rest assured the farmstore will also be stocked all week!  

The world doesn't end at 22 degrees, but this is your last chance at Farmers Market for the year.

Hannah harvests cilantro at the end of October!

We may be snowed over, but we're still going!  Above, our fall farm helper, Hannah, harvests cilantro after peeling back its snow-covered frost protection fabric.  

Happy November, local eaters!  Thank you for a wonderful last farmers market last week! For us, at least, it certainly proved that the extension to the end of October is well worth it. 

The first week with no market is always a big transition for small farms, and when it couples with the first winter storm warning of the year, we really notice!  With our extended market seasons this year, we had 28 Saturdays in a row of late Friday night harvests, early Saturday morning market setup, and the wild nine-to-noon festivities of market itself. We will miss seeing you all at market these next few months, but have to admit that sitting in the barn drinking coffee and watching the sun come up and the snow fall is rather nice this morning.  

The good news is, you can still get plenty of local produce even though market season is over!  Believe it or not, we are still harvesting, still delivering to most of our restaurant accounts, and still working in the fields. The farmstore is open all the time, and loaded with goodness: baby greens, onions, garlic, cabbages, boc choi, carrots, beets, salad turnips, and potatoes (so many potatoes, we have enacted our fall potato special:  buy 3 or more bags, and each bag is $3 instead of $5!) hot chilies, and more. There are always eggs now, as the young flock revels in cleaning up the field blocks after our final harvests. Feel free to swing by anytime that is convenient! The farmstore is always open (the sliding door sometimes gets a little sticky in wet weather, but it's never locked--just pull harder if it's stuck), and we will keep it stocked as long as possible.  If you haven't been to the farmstore before, you can find it at 76 Bell Lane; just pull on in the the driveway past the house, and enter through the sliding glass door at the front of the barn. Our roasted coffee beans are currently out of stock, but will be back on this week as soon as we pick up our pallet of raw beans from the shipping dock in Missoula, probably on Monday. 

We have been focusing most of our work this week on getting good progress on the yurt that will be our new, everything-under-one-roof home starting this winter, preparing the platform to be ready to set the yurt up hopefully late this coming week. We'll be out there today, enjoying the clearing weather that's coming in, and will be posting some updates to the Kickstarter campaign soon.  Thanks, again, to all of you who supported us there or cheered us on along the way!

The Case of One Eye, Strong Women, and A Soup Doctor

Mary and Hannah, on one of the many trips to gather farm firewood in Roaring Lion.

As the receptionist for the Big Sky Eye Clinic unlocked the deadbolt on the entrance and took a look at Mary and I, she remarked, ‘I think you are the dirtiest people to ever come in here.’ 

It wasn’t a funny comment, really, just a fact. I nodded, and looked at her with my one good eye.

Mary gracefully smiled, and then quickly grimaced from her rapidly swelling upper lip.     

We were a sorry pair, coming down from our third day of gathering firewood from a Roaring Lion side canyon, in between harvests and farm tasks.  We were blackened from felling trees in the burn, bruised from lugging and wrestling rounds of fir into into our truck, sometimes with straps hitched to the truck, but mostly by sheer determined might. We were wide eyed from the adrenaline of a 4-wheel-drive and odd angles that reminded us of when the wheel came off our Kubota this spring. We were tired from another long day, one that was supposed to be recreation, but left us rather beat up.  Mary had gotten whacked in the lip when the branch she was using to hoist a big round gave way, while I had injured my eye with a chunk of wood that had someone managed to fly at me, at an odd angle behind my glasses.  

In the chair, after a few gasps by the doctor as he pulled the offending debris out of my eye and prescribed some ointment, I profusely thanked  him for his pronouncement that I’d most likely be back to normal within a day or two — or so.  

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I promised to shake his hand the next time it was clean, and we assured the receptionist that we were farmers, not full-time professional firewood gatherers. After we wrote a check for the most expensive cord of firewood we collected this season (last year it was tire chains and half a tank of truck fuel), we reminded our two newest acquaintances that the farmer’s market is, well, this Saturday. Tomorrow.

It's hard to believe it's been six months since the first spring markets, and the load we'll bring tomorrow is far more than that first early market in the park in April. As I write, Mary is washing and packing the last of what we have. It’s more than you might expect, given the prediction of cold October day in Montana.  One entire side of our walk in cooler, a long row, is lined with waxed boxes of food — broccoli, cabbages, cauliflower, potatoes, spinach, all our greens, turnips, carrots, celery, peppers, tomatillos, so much food. Crates of winter squash and fresh tomatoes sit at the ready in the farm store, waiting to load tomorrow morning. 

Even though we had our usual rush of tasks, plus some wild high winds this week that lofted some of our row cover all the way over toward the Pharoplex (really), I still think of the farm as a refuge. You keep coming out to the farm, with so many of you this week buying produce, sharing with us gifts like the box of apples, the hand-me-down insulated overalls in near mint condition (those were in use tonight).  And even though we were deep in our own world of tasks like cutting  firewood this week, (so we don’t run out before the weather turns) the news, of the hashtag #MeToo, didn’t escape us.  Our farm wouldn’t be what it is without my strong Mary, and as I listened to her stories, those of her friends and our community, it was a reminder of how often our world is not quite how we want it to be.  

Although we don’t know everyone as personally as we like, we like to think of the farm as a refuge for everyone in our community.  Often it’s proud families, moms that tote kids and households around the farm.  One of our new members, this week, chasing her boys outside the chicken coop, like a giant mother hen. Toby and Amanda, both farm members, know our place well enough to give a guided tour. And even if our current kitchen is short on hot water, Hannah, our fall crew, knows just where to go if we ever need hot water to clean up and scrub washing and packing tables.  And sometimes, you are the ones that make us cry, telling us about your own sweet victories from deep within this space we call home, the Bitterroot. To me, that is why we farm, it’s a refuge of sorts, it makes us better than we are, it makes us realize what we can be.

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So, even though the weather is sure to be terrible tomorrow, come on out. Farmers markets are democratic places, where ideas and voices count. Mary will be doling out soup recipes with a new twist. Let me be clear: this is a prescription. Tell us what looks good, what flavors you like and what you don’t, and we will come up with a soup recipe, on the spot, just for you, based on what we have on hand. Mary says that if you don’t like what the soup doctor prescribes, we’ll buy back your soup, or your produce! After a long day in the fields, she says she has far more inspiration for soups than time to write recipes, but would love to be challenged to come up with the perfect soup for your week.  Mostly ingredients in the booth, under $10, directions easy enough to fit on an index card, and we get a conversation to boot.  If you are up for the soup-scription challenge, stop on by the booth tomorrow morning. 

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Heroics and Hangovers: Wild Farm Week

Our compost spreader, coated with frost on a 20 degree morning last week.

Left alone last week with our part-time helper away on vacation, we found ourselves in a sort of bizarre farm party spiraling out of control.  By the end of the week we were dodging piles of storage crops in every corner, cleaned out of frost-protection materials, and fighting a serious chicken hangover. I don't remember what project it was, but I do remember once coming across Noah in the midst of something and asking, only half-joking, shouldn't there be some kind of adult supervision on this?”  

It was kind of just a perfect storm; another night of frosts on Saturday after a market drenched with rain, and then a deep-freeze on Tuesday with temperatures around 20. Sizable orders for the growers' co-op, our local wholesale accounts, and the farmstore needed harvesting.  The transitioning of the old laying flock to stewing hens, which we'd been stalling for over a month, reached a state where it could no longer be ignored as the new young flock clamored from their moveable chicken tractors, demanding their move to the big-house and larger pasture spaces, mobbing the feed bucket and cracked door more excitedly each day.  

Graham, Maria, and Emily help bag our most recent potato harvest.

By the time we reached Friday, and needed to harvest for the Apple Day market, we’d already weathered 2 nights of being up past 2 a.m., a number of early mornings, and were trying to count up the number of heroic farm acts we'd accomplished in that week. 

Our final onions brought in as the freeze settled on the ground (3 more full "giant" bins). Thousands of bed-feet of frost protection. 64 chickens butchered. Fixing a flat tire on the 6-wheeled mobile chicken barn. An epically rainy market last week. Demolition of an old platform in preparation for building the base for the yurt. It was hard to keep count. 

Luckily we had help from a spate of small-farm heroes through the week: Greg, who came on Sunday to help finish shingling half the roof of the farmhouse, and begin deconstruction work on the building site for the yurt.  Toby, who brought food more than once, and her able hands for harvesting on Friday night, staying, as a wild-party guest might, well past the time when she’d planned to get back home.  Graham, Emily, who showed up with a friend shortly before dusk to weigh and bag 200 lbs of potatoes.  The un-identified customer who grabbed on to one leg of our canopy as I held another, when the worst of the wind gusts came through on Apple Day, toppling one of our display shelves and tossing neighboring canopies all up and down Bedford Street.   Graham, who threw us a tub of Tucker Family Farm chocolate ricotta mousse as we packed the truck to go home from Apple Day.  And of course all of you who consistently support us, coming to market in the rain and wind, adding a stop up our gravel road to your grocery errands to buy from the farmstore, or boosting us with a hug or a keep-the-chin-up pep talk at market when we could barely do math through a cold sleepy stupor.  We are grateful for you all!

And after our wild week, we collapsed into bed before it was fully dark on Saturday, and slept an incredibly long time, but still both stumbled around a bit Sunday.  I can’t remember the last time either of us suffered from a classic drink-and-party hangover, but it turns out that over-indulging in hardcore farming and too many chickens can leave a person with a similar feeling.  We are vowing to be more temperate in our chicken butchering and fall farming in the future.  This weeks' cure was more sleep, a good walk with the husky, chicken soup, and generous helpings of pickled beets.  

We're back on track folks, with a farmstore and member shares packed with goodness, and three more Hamilton farmers markets left.  Come on out and see us, load up with fall produce, and see what kind of farm-fueled party of your own you can throw!  

With love, gratitude, and winter squash,
Mary and Noah

Noah and Greg do demolition work for the yurt platform.

Winter squash cure in our proportions house.

Summer Camp Nightmares

It was more than 15 years ago, but I remember my own summer camp nightmare like it was yesterday.  One summer, back when I was writing my master’s thesis, I spent four weeks teaching in Costa Rica. This wasn’t an ordinary teaching assignment. 

I arrived in Costa Rica ready to embrace high school students looking for a challenge. What I got, was 14 high school girls expecting a tropical vacation. We were assigned to a tropical bird sanctuary. And that doesn’t sound too bad at first. But our main task was to wake up at 4am, before the heat of the day, and weed acres of maize — essentially food for the birds. As we hacked our way through the underbrush, watching for snakes, I could hear the girls cursing me out. It wasn’t that they hated me. They despised me.  To make matters worse, we were all roommates. We were housed, in one tiny, one room cabin. I would fall asleep to either giggles, or grumbles as I got out of bed, or a cautiously knocked on the door, a small courtesy to check if everyone was decent.

I’d like to say that I learned a lot about organic agriculture that summer. What I did learn, though, was how to live, or at least cope, with teenage girls. I was surrounded by them, and none of us had hardly any personal space.  

Weeks, later, after having received terrible evaluations, and being placed with a group of coffee farmers, and an amazing group of students, I realized that I had made it through the worst.

This week, with many of our farm members and friends just back, or literally just off to summer camp, we are waiting for the stories to come in.  This week on the farm, we are trellising, staking, and pruning some of our most important and valuable crops. We are all working overtime, kind of a nightmarish camp re-enactment. At market we’ll have some of these crops tomorrow — the first peppers and some eggplant. And one of my favorite, a large abundance of heirloom summer squash.

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As I write, Mary and Kayla are muddling through the work. We’ve just done a limited harvest for tomorrow since the plant care and maintenance this week is so important, even vital to good production of tomatoes, where each fruit week counts, just like the days going by at summer camp.

Since we have to get out and finish work, and we need the entire team on board, I’ll be brief. We’ll have our own summer squash recipe at market, but if you can’t wait until tomorrow, or want to swing by this evening, we highly recommend our distant friend’s blog, Dishing up the Dirt. Since we will have basil at market tomorrow, we recommend the Roasted Summer Squash Pesto.

You are family. Like it or not.

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It's marathon weekend in Missoula, and even though it's been a few years since I've run that race, it's an event that feels like a family holiday. In the first five years, as the race grew up, I ran three fulls and two halves, and it's still my favorite road race anywhere (sorry, Portland).  My sister and her family have been to visit for that weekend for the last 8 years or more.  Amazingly, they continue to come out from Oregon each year, even though we now run this farm up the Bitterroot, and even though the second Sunday in July is pretty much when the weeds start to get out of hand in a most desperate way. But even though they'll be running 13.1 miles on Sunday, they happily pitch in to bring order and releif to whatever beds we point them towards.  Every year we wish we were more on top of it, wish we could host them better, apologize for the rough accomodations, our frazzled state, and the wall of weeds we simply have to tackle.  Every year, they tell us not to worry, they put up with our chaos and our late Friday night, take us to dinner at the brewery, and remind us that we are loved. 

Marathons have been on my mind all summer, and especially since the wheel came off the tractor, back on Memorial Day weekend. It was my old runing coach Anders' voice that I heard when I looked back at the parked Kubota on a Saturday evenign in late May, and realized that the wheel was coming off the tractor. We've made analogies from farming to marathons before, and this year more than ever, it feels apt. 

In the training class for my first marathon, Anders dismissed the notion of "the wall" at a certain mile.  For every runner and every race, he emphasized, the hardest moment would be different. The phrase he used instead was "when the wheels come off the bus.." If you go out too fast at first caught up in starting-gun excitement, if you fail to fuel properly, or if you don't adjust your pace when suddenly the temperature is 20 degrees hotter than most of your training runs, you can end up at mile 12 or mile 23, with the wheel starting to come off the bus. When the wheels come off the bus, it's hard to recover. 

That was how the farm felt, in late May and early June; we'd started off strong, but perhaps we tried to do too much, with the  infrastructure, labor, and systems we had.  There's plenty of analysis and thinking and planning to do to avoid this in the coming years.  But like in a marathon, we also have to figure out the best way to get through the season.  In the running class, we talked about how to prevent the wheels coming off the bus, but also how to deal with it if it did happen.  And that was when I started to understand I wasn't training to run just one marathon; I was learning to run, for the longer term.  If you're in it for the long haul, you don't want to just blast through and stumble to the finish line, swearing never to run a marathon again.  We talked about how to avoid hurting yourself in the long term, how to salvage the race with perhaps not the time goal you'd set out with, but maybe trying to enjoy the course, the community, the event. And, most importantly, to plan for the next one.  

We had to adjust our race goals for this season.  It's not that one bad tractor wheel thew us off; that was more of a symptom, really. Tryign to do too much, not on top of everything, we missed some basic maintenance.  The tractor out of commission for a week slowed us down, made many tasks harder, but it wasn't the thing that threw off the season; it was a slow-down that forced us, in a very good way, to look at our whole system and strategy, and recognize we were not on a very good path.  If we continued to push, we'd maybe manage to limp through the season, but we'd likely be too burnt out, exhusted, and depleted, to be able to manage other season of farming. We'd be the kind of runner who suffers through one marathon, and never ever does it again.  That's not what we want to be as a farm; we want this to be an annual marathon, enjoyable even though it's challenging, and something that we are in a habit of for life.  To get there, we realized, we needed to have some help, and we needed to face the fact that we weren't going to hit our income goals, and that creates some problems. At some point in a race, you simply can't go fast enough to make up for some slow middle miles; when 15 beds of greens fail, and a few more crops are paltry compared to the plan, we know it'll be hard to reach the income goals set in February.  

But it's ok.  We reset to realized that we could recover, we could continue to do it again, if we ended the year just breaking even (paying for the many improvements to the farm, like new fencing, new hoop houses and propagation house), and with a secure and comfortable place for us to live.  It was, in some ways, like changing our race-time goal to a half-hour longer, but seeing that we'd be much happier in the long run.  This is not our year to set a personal record, but it is a year for lots of learning, and a good bit of growing up as a farm.    

When I joined the Run Wild Missoula training class to prepare for my first marathon, I assumed I'd train for and run one in my life, check that off a list, and move on.  Instead, I found a whole family of runners, and a regular lifesaver of a passtime.  I haven't run much at all the last few years, but regular running again is one of the benchmarks of success that Noah and I have set for our farm.  If you start to see us at the meetups of the Bitterroot Running Club, or loping along forest service roads with our happy husky, you'll know we're starting to run a truly succesful farm (and life).  

Over the years, and especially over these last few weeks, we have felt love from our farm-family too. We can see all the ways we have fallen short of our goals (there should have been an earlier batch of carrots, there should have been another round of peas,  and half the time this summer, we've not quite had a recipe insert ready for member pickup up day).  We've apologized, wished we could host you better, and yet just like the family-family, the farm-family has come back again and again, put up with our shortcomings, and reminded us that we are loved.  We've heard from you, sometimes with teary eyes all around, that we matter to you, to your families and your dinner tables, and to the community here. We've been completely amazed at how you have pitched in, raising more funds, and more quickly, than we'd really ever expected. If you have not been following our kickstarter campaign to fund our yurt, the good news is, we passed our goal on the 4th of July, and are within $1,000 of the top-up goal that gets us an insulated panel floor that (most importantly) saves us probably 10 days of fall building time--time that can go back into the farm, bettering things for this fall and next year, too. We are just amazed, and so grateful.  

Next year's marathon will come again in July, and we'll be doing our best to keep the wheels on the tractor, and the wheels on the bus.  A home will be a huge part of that, and we thank you all.  

Holding Up the Sky

A little surgery on the 1976 camper top, before we added some timber framed supports.

All last week, and maybe even the week before that, I was bracing myself.   It wasn’t just in anticipation of all the emails, calls, texts, visits and support we’ve been getting from our kickstarter campaign. Another storm was brewing.  That storm arrived from the west on Monday evening, pulling up to our farm in a small green Honda. Out stepped Kayla, our full time crew member. We’ve been worried about our tight and cluttered barn space, how to manage another person, when Mary and I sometimes, at our scale of production, are working hard to just manage ourselves .  

I feel like the stakes are high. We’ve just finished the main planting, and the weeds on most crops are beginning to explode. We are well into our main season, with weekly deliveries, and farm member pickups as well as continued planting, harvest, and planning.  How were we going to mesh Kayla into our rocky rhythm?  

By the time we got the timber frame brace built for the camper we bought from a neighbor, and by the time we had managed to safely load the camper on our truck, and lumber it on down the road (a few days late, on Wednesday), I confess we had fallen into our rhythm. Kayla is freeing up time by seeding, washing and packing, and harvesting. That left more time for me to work on our campaign, greet members, and actually farm. It’s an amazing what one more full time person can do. We’ve been scabbing it together this season — as many of you know. We've had some part time trained help, but with someone coming only one or two days a week, you fall out of the rhythm of farming, you forgot stuff.

And this week, with the arrival of Kayla, and even though she’s family, Mary’s niece, I feel like we can hold up the sky. This legally paid, on the books employee, is gonna help all of us. 

According to a 75-year, Harvard study, one of the biggest secrets to happiness, and I think farm and life happiness, is finding good relationships:  “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.....The biggest predictor of your happiness and fulfillment overall in life is, basically, love." 

What’s more interesting is that it’s not the number of friends you have, the data found. It’s the quality and depth of the relationships. 

““It’s the quality of the relationships—how much vulnerability and depth exists within them; how safe you feel sharing with one another; the extent to which you can relax and be seen for who you truly are, and truly see another.””

Not only does Kayla help us make time for ourselves, but the time we had to visit with you this past week, changed us.  The questions you are asking us, about the farm, ourselves, our strength, our future, they are good ones. From the questions and conversations and all the support you gave us this week, I'll confess you made us cry a lot. But, I think, that’s what we need. Thanks for letting us feel, and helping us feel that we can embrace one another, our farm, and on the best days, hold up part of the sky, even if it’s just to apply some screws and caulk to a problem we need to fix.

See you at market. Kayla may be around in the morning, will likely meet some of you, but she's got the day off to get to know her new summer home.  

What we haven’t said yet

We are tough people, and you know that, but at times like this I need to remind myself.  Mary is so tough that she can wrestle me to the ground; while traveling as a researcher in Panama years ago, she defended herself from a situation that could have been deadly.  About the same time, I broke up a mob that was on the verge of losing control in The Ivory Coast. When living in the Philippines, on assignment for National Geographic, I survived a fall down a ravine, that, while left me unscathed, landed a leech in my eyeball. And, this past winter, in Turkey, one an outside work trip, while suffering through a fever, I endured clients that unsuccessfully tried to bribe me, day after day, hour after hour to the extent that I started fearing for my safety.  And we farm. Yes, we are tough people.

Yet, when we had a visit from a distant non-profit last week, one that knows farming but not production agriculture, the leaders asked us tough questions. I ticked off our current challenges: $3000 of unexpected expenses (that week), a broken passenger vehicle (sitting at the mechanic), two large crop failures already this year due to bad germination and massive work on the new garden (mostly rock picking) and not enough organic matter. Mary and I take pride in our greens production, and it hurt when I mowed the ten 120’ foot beds over the course of this week and last week of greens that should have been high value crops: baby spinach, arugula, salad mix. Patchy germination, immediate bolting, and a thick layer of weeds left us with nothing worth salvaging, rather than the projected 1,000 pounds of greens—enough to supply all of our members, chefs, and the farmers’ market for two weeks.  Income from those beds, with good production, could pay my student loans for a summer or make a go at paying our annual tractor loan payment.   While we’ve completed our propagation house on schedule, we finished the new high tunnel late, and that will mean later crops.  Those two, two hundred hour projects have left us exhausted. We’ve been working 12-15 hour days, since longer than we can remember, and we are on the verge of burning out. While we’ve doubled our production and have purchased and built innovative tools that can change our farming, and makeit all more sustainable, but we don’t feel sustained. We have two thousand dollars of fence materials to put up and at least one other big farm infrastructure project this summer.  We’ll ask for at least one large workparty, but even prepping for this projects — so it can take people - seems exhausting. You all know as as happy people, and because of the exhaustion, I need to confess, we are not happy or feeling like ourselves these days. As we look at our very real shortfalls, it’s clear that we will not make our income goals this season.  We will be do a deep dive into our books soon, but the quick overview provides this brutally honest potential:

After we pay normal season debts, expenses, and labor, at the end of the season we may have precariously little money left to make it through until next season. We run a tight ship, with our $280,000 of debt (mortgage on the land and house we rent, my student loans, startup loans from family, and our tractor loan). Our cashflow projections, though, if we adjust them for some late plantings and shortfalls, give confidence to my gut for our long-term potential.   Butas I write this it’s ten minutes past two am and Mary is still washing and packing. Even for us tough people, this is extreme and not normal. We could have avoided this, perhaps with more rest and planning this winter, but we didn’t get that rest.  There are a lot of reasons for this.

We want to be a community farm, we want to feed all income levels, that Mary and I want to have time to be strong members of this community.  It’s clear to us that we are dangerously close of not reaching our vision, that we could not be around next year.

We’ve decided while we may need to take on work this winter, and that’s normal in the early years of farming, we cannot take on winter work if we are faced with another long winter of building, especially in a farm that doesn’t shelter us well from the elements — or have a kitchen.  We need housing, and while we can see a pathway towards building our core farm infrastructure, on that sustains us and our community, we can’t build a house — we don’t have the money or the time, for at least three to five years.

Because of this, we are taking some immediate and urgent actions. We will get our Jetta back from the mechanic, but we are not going to repair it. One vehicle will suffice till we have funds to fix that. 

An email is going out to our banker, later this weekend, letting him know we are okay for our tractor loan. It’s not this season that’s really in danger— it’s next.  We are communicating our shortfalls to the three chefs we work with and coordinating sales for other farms.  And, we are letting you, and our core farm members know that we are still on track to feed our community this year — despite the fact that salad mix will be short for the next two weeks and a few crops will be late. 

But the big thing, the thing that lets us continue this work, and can help us get through this season with more hope and excitement, is that we will need some winter housing, on farm, something that’s not our barn or the rental house, so we can work (on and off farm), recharge, and plan, or we just won’t be around next season.  This is a crisis, and like most farms that shut down, this is a slow one. We don’t want to fail. We have one good idea, one that we think solves the key problems, and it can give us a suitable home-space that is safe, easy, and comfortable enough to last as long as we need, allowing us to continue to build up the farm without wearing ourselves down. 

I know this a lot for many of you to take in, but I wanted to write now, letting you know what we are thinking and feeling and that, we are going to need help.  By the middle of next week we will outline our solution with more clarity. We are all in this together, and we are going to need some help.

We look forward to seeing you at market.

-Noah, Mary and SweetRoot

P.S. We have a growing pile of dishes and tupperware containers to the wonderful friends who have brought us nourishment this week. We love you.

THE FIRE MOUNTAIN SHEEP CHASE

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It’s wildfire season in Montana.  This plume was from an evening when the fire made a huge jump in size, and had us wondering if it might even come over to this side of Blue Mountain.

It was a simple enough phrase, the short, shocking sort of call that can wrench a farmer out of bed at any hour: "Noah, the sheep are gone!" It was about the last news Mary wanted to bring from an early morning round of chores with a big day of garden-harvest planned. But this task needed both of us, and Noah was up andready in a heartbeat at those words. The dangers of farming vary by region, of course, but wherever they are based, nothing rips farmers out of a deep sleep quite like the knowledge that some portion of the year's food or income is gone or in danger.  

For our friends in the coffee lands of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, it can be torrential rains that bring the fear of landslides.  For ranchers in Eastern Montana, it might be the threat of late spring hail and snow in calving season. We are gradually learning the challenges of our space here between Western Montana hills.  

That morning was not the first time our sheep had escaped. After one June thunderstorm, they'd shown up in a neighbor's pasture just down the road. That morning, even before 6 am, several neighbors rallied together to gather our herd. But this day was different.  The Lolo Complex fires had doubled in size the night before, fueled by dramatic winds, and the the whole valley had that smokey ominous light. We knew that when we closed our garden gate late the night before we had scared a herd of deer that thundered out of the pasture. If that was what had taken down some of the electric fence, it was possible the sheep had been loose for almost eight hours already. We had no idea where or how far they might have gone. 

After a hopeful first check of the property, we had to expand the search, and cruised the neighborhood in the farm truck, peering into pastures, knocking on doors, ducking through fences and behind barns of people we barely know, some we still haven't met.  It's not the best way to meet your neighbors, wide eyed and tense, with an opening line of "our sheep are missing; they escaped in the storms last night." 

So, we scoured river bottoms, crashed through brushy thickets and back pastures, crossing surprising little streams and holding barbed wire strands apart for each other. We began to form a whole new mental map of our rural neighborhood, surprising connections and secret-feeling passages. But the growing worry and frustration overshadowed any sense of excitement of discovery. We couldn't help but think of the stories from Ivan Doig's latest book The Bartenders Tale, which had helped us through some a winter drive this past year. The sheepherder Canada Dan is one of those rough western holdouts: independent, tough and weathered, a little outside of normal society. One day, also after big storms, he drags himself back to the Medicine Lodge bar, the center of the town, swearing never to go back to that work again after losing a whole herd of sheep in a surprise lightening storm.  Growing grim and tense ourselves, we exchanged looks, admitting that there was a chance these sheep, our flock of five, was flat-out gone. We could feel a new kinship with Canada Dan, worn down and ready to be done with it all, wondering what it would be like to be one of these neighbors who were just sitting on a porch enjoying leisurely weekend morning coffee. We wondered what we'd gotten ourselves into.  It’s hard not to think about how all the hours of work with these animals could end up being for nothing if we couldn’t find them.  

The coyotes who inhabit the nearby butte warned us and the dogs away from their particular rocky knoll on a morning hike this July.    We are very wary that our sheep pasture less than one mile away from one of the dens.

And yet, at the same time, we could be grateful that these sheep were not our complete and only income--grateful that we started small, and hadn't bet everything on the sale of a flock.  Because it seemed more than likely that these sheep had headed far out.  We're starting to think of ourselves as farmers now, at least in a small way, subsistence farming with the goal of eatingthe whole year almost exclusively what we have grown here; it's exciting and satisfying. But those moments of lost sheep can feel frighteningly powerless...what does one do with five sheep missing completely? We even considered calling in to the public radio station, like one might for a lost dog.  In the end, we just kept searching. It was all we could do. 

Back when we started working together in Forest Grove, we thought we were really getting into it with our eight hens, one bag of coffee, pilot coffee course, and coffee CSA.  And we were learning, digging in, starting our roots and even our homesteading in that triple city lot.  Some of you who have been with us since the start remember that first roast, the Chicken Chaser, named for those first forays into our home-growing and our coffee and farmer partnerships.    

We are in so much deeper now. Back then the chickens, the handful of raised beds, the greens in the garden window, the coffee, the student programs were additions, sidelines to other work and more-standard jobs.  Now it's a quarter acre garden, 21 hens, and the small herd of lambs intended to supply the year's meat for us and a neighboring family.  Not only that, it's agrowing coffee CSA in Missoula, steadily increasing list of mail supporters, coffee picked up by pallet instead of individual bag, and an all-out effort to launch a student course. We have let go of the stability of our old jobs, and the farming and the Forest Voices work has become our attempts at livelihood, so the stakes are so much higher now.  

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Mary prepares to open our improptu sheep trailer after we've moved them over to a pasture we share with neighbors. 

When the sheep are out or the corn blows down, we feel those higher stakes now in a way that we didn't before.  And yet, we still have backups, still have some security.  Even if those sheep were never found, we'd have lost investments and time, but we wouldn't go bankrupt, though we'd be eating less meat.  If coyotes or raccoons found the chicken coop, we wouldn't go hungry.  We'd just have to make fewer omelets.   

Many of our farming friends and partners, in contrast, are all in and feel even more acutely those passing storms, rolling fires, and threats to the thin margin between making it and not. Storms in Indonesia are increasing, and while Eko and his team in Java work hard to protect microclimate and reforest degraded slopes, the coffee harvest comes with increasingly unpredictable timing.  Many farmers in Vietnam have to rely on a system of corrupt water trucks that ply delivery routes in order to water their vegetables.  And once they get the water to the nearest farm road, it still has to reach fruit trees and vegetables through pipe.  Those farmers who live too far from good access, have to buy or use a water pump.  These are the farmers that can do the math in their head, know how many of gallons of gas, how much time and labor a crop really takes. One thing we've gained in this sometimes tough year of planting and growing is a growing kinship with these farmers who, like us, are often small and often at the edge. Like us, they build stuff, break equipment and learn to fix it. 

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Our neighbor Sig, who raised hundreds of sheep in this neighborhood at a time when, as he puts it “a pair of Levi’s cost $4,” lends a hand as we load up the sheep in the improvised stock trailer made of straw bales and Noah’s old art-booth panels (below) to move them to new and more-secure pasture. He hasn’t lost any of his sheep-handling skills since those days, and showed us a few good tricks, like how the right hold makes even our biggest sheep easy to put where we want. 

Sometimes we question this way, perhaps more often than we should.  But there are times when it can be a series of blows--yet another shock from the solar-charged electric fence, another animal out, another repair or trip to the emergency room.  We barter for what we can, and more and more, we buy the raw materials, the steel, wood, tools, seeds and animals instead of buying something ready-made.  It's all a way to build the soil and skills that, on our best days, make for a hand-crafted life.  

Language fails to find a term for this occupation,  maybe because it is so many rolled into one:  mechanic, repair person, conflict resolution artist, permaculturist, weight lifter, electrician, plumbing expert, animal doctor, laborer, soil builder, chef, lover, farmer.

We found those sheep again, in the end, not far from home.  Just as we had decided things were pretty dire and were returning home for some food and water before launching a several-hour scouring of the neighboring butte and low-lying areas along the river, the second sheep-news exclamation of the day changed our course of action again"Noah, look! The sheep!" Two of them had wandered out of the head-high thicket of thistle across the road where, apparently, they had all passed the morning hunkered down and ignoring our searching and calling. By the time we returned they had wandered up to graze Mike's lawn and drink from the irrigation ditch. With a bit of advanced herding we had all five back into the home pasture within a half-hour.  

Perhaps there are metaphors here for our new lives. As we dig deeper in, it's up to us, all of us, to neighbor better, to make those connections we always believed we could have.  Sometimes this connection is just lending a hand, helping round up sheep, or discussing a new idea over coffee or a meal. Yet other times, it's the wrangling of some sort of peace, doing deep thinking and acting with ourselves, our land, and neighbors.

We call this member of our flock "The President," affectionately termed because the way this ram leads our entire flock and comes running to us.

Editor's Note: We first published this essay nearly four years ago, back when we were just homesteading, but decided it deserved a place here, on the farm blog.

2017 Crop Harvest and Availability Decoder

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Every season, we try to push what we can grow. We try to grow new crops, both earlier into our season and longer. With just ninety days between our average last and first frosts, it's an interesting challenge.  The graphic above represents what we hope we can do, and what we plan on, using all of the season exstension tools at our disposal for our main market crops.  On our farm, this means row cover, hoop houses, northern-adapted varieties, and an arsenal of quick hoops to provide double and sometimes triple protection for crops.  

This table is a visual simplification drawn from our many enormous spreadsheets and our data on the 100+ different varieties of vegetables we grow. I love making information visual, having both the hard numbers that make our farm work, and these guides that show some of the big-picture goals of what we are after.

This is a good time to mention that what we have early goes first to farm members, particularly the subscriptions. If you haven't already signed up for a membership, you can view the options and sign up here. 

Farmer Dreams, Slumber Parties, and Broccoli's 3rd Grade Popularity

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Above: Around a campfire late one night in Crocker Range National Park, in Borneo, I share stories with farmers while kids tend to our campfire, conducting their own slumber-party dances.

Last weekend Mary and I ventured off our farm, together, overnight, for the first time in almost two years.  We left a three page typed list of instructions with our farm sitter, Hannah, with the level of detail probably common to the first time new parents leave their precious baby.  Everything from what to do if the pipes froze to where the kittens like to hide, to all the helpful phone numbers we could think of, and instructions of how to handle an emergency in the middle of the night. (Two different neighbors were on alert for potential 3 a.m. door knocking). 

We were headed to an invite-only gathering of small market farmers in Idaho. The three-day conference on the lake proved well worth the intensive departure prep and anxiety.  Although we never completely forgot about our own farm, and Mary had to stop me more than once from phoning to ask Hannah how the chickens were, we were quickly immersed in discussions with our fellow farmers. 

We heard inspiring tales of success and also massive crop failures.  One family shared how a combination of bad weather and bad luck meant a loss of $12,000 of winter squash this year.  But they also talked about how they were weathering that, and shared their strategies for containing three wild kids during full farming season.  We laughed as they described their 9-year-old girl driving the tractor.
 
"She's basically the weight on the seat to keep the cruise control activated while we all pitch pumpkins in the bin down the row."
 
We heard of buildings being added on to, in not the best of ways, and commiserated about our own building experiences. We shared some of our own failures, and our decision cook outdoors again for second winter so we could grow the farm.  We relished being in a group of peers: people who believed, like us, so wholly in the rightness of good food grown well that they did not think we were crazy at all.

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Above: In the shade and shadow lines, a farmer and I rest along a trail in Yunnan Province in China to exchange stories.

The first night, even after we dragged ourselves to bed exhausted, I couldn't stop "jaw-jacking," (a term I picked up there from farmer Sean). I was comparing ideas with Emily, a farmer from Sandpoint, in the next bunk from ours, about making a culti-packer, and seeding and care strategies for carrot plantings. Mary, knowing we had to start again early the next morning, kept elbowing me in the ribs. I just decided to take it because I was too excited about ideas, thoughts, and sharing, to stop and sleep. I'm stubborn, and I'm lucky she puts up with me.

It was just like a good old fashioned slumber party in that way, where you are too excited to sleep.  In some ways, it seems we are probably too old for slumber parties, but when we can make it happen, somehow we come away feeling younger, like both time and possibilities are on our side. Like maybe we are winning. 

Falling asleep, with a background of farmer voices, I thought back to years ago, when I traveled around Malaysia interviewing small farmers, learning about how they got started and challenges they overcame.  Back then, sleeping under the stars in papaya orchards and vegetable gardens all over Asia, I never thought I'd become a full-time farmer myself. But the seeds got in somewhere, added up and made part of me, part of the farm.

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Above: I spent weeks camping out in Malaysia on farms, interviewing farmers about their own struggles -- growing and figuring out how to make it. Papaya trees sway in the moonlight while star trails and clouds move across the sky over the campsite.

At the conference, conversations circled widely.  A topic on pest and disease could end up touching on what we consider the "mental parasites" of self-doubt and fear. How, we asked each other, do we recover from failures, learn, and move on, without becoming disheartened?  And how do we collectively educate and inspire, build new generations of organic food culture? 

I got into it directly at the Victor elementary school this past week, as I talked about the farmer spirit of learning to live, building, and making. I had one third grade class spell bound when I talked about our inventions.

'But can you grown heaps of broccoli?' one of them asked. And suddenly I was inundated with questions about broccoli.  When I got back to the farm I announced, "The kids in Victor all want broccoli!' Mary looked up skeptically from filling in our complex crop planning spreadsheets, so I had to elbow her in the ribs, just a bit, to get my point across:  "I mean it, whatever you have mapped out, triple it!" 

We laughed and we both needed it. The flip side of sweet farmer slumber party dreams are the creeping winter-dark worries.  Last night, I woke with a start, from a dream in which the roof of our chicken barn had blown off suddenly in a storm. Zukes, hearing me wake, did his best to smother my fears by draping his full 8-pound purring kitten self across my face.  I managed to convince myself we were all OK and drift back to sleep. 

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Above: Mary works on our crop planning, using one of many spreadsheets we've designed to track the location of crops, harvesting, and planting throughout the growing season. 

But worry is not just for the sleeping hours.  In the daylight, too, at this time of year, our complex mix of excitement and fear takes on many shapes.  We're buying seeds, potting soil, tools, and all kinds of building materials right now, with our first market income still far away.  In a huge step for us, we just took on our first bank loan this month: $20,000 for a tractor with enough power, and the capacity to start every week. We're not making these investments blindly. We have careful analyses, cash flow projections, and budgets based on real numbers from our past few years of sales.  But still, it can feel crazy. But we know, too, that if we don't make some improvements, some good investments in our systems, we will not hit our goals and will not produce enough to make our living. 

I joke to Mary that the more the ground thaws, the deeper our spending freeze should go, but my joke seems kind of lame and falls flat.  We know it's no joke that one credit card is filled, but we both snicker even if the joke is only OK, because maybe some jokes, some keeping it light is an important part of the slumber party feeling that helps keep the excitement up. 

The other thing we need, to be honest, are more farm members.  People willing to say "hey, I'm with you guys for the season, let's see what you can do."  The first spring payments from those memberships are what will get us through to the market season, but right now we mostly just need to know that you are on board; you can still reserve your membership with just a $20 deposit (and thank you, so much, to everyone who has done so already). 

We returned from the conference to find another great surprise: in addition to a few more members, an anonymous note had arrived in our mailbox, with a bank check for a donation to our eatership fund--enough to cover one peak-season share or large feed bag for a family in need. Whoever you are, we love you, and it will help! We have successfully raised about $1500 in Eatership funds, and have started making matches to families that need some help.  We need help spreading the word about our memberships and have tried to make the website as easy as possible to navigate and pay that deposit, whether you can cover the whole membership cost yourself, or if you need a boost.

As I write, the farm darkens. The chickens that I just checked are chortling on their roost bars. Malaya is snoring under my desk. Air from the open window wafts in; I smell spring coming, snowmelt, mud, compost. We are starting seeds so soon. I can hardly wait until I fall asleep, but I know I'll have late-night ideas to share. It'll take a few elbows I'm sure. But it's worth it.

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Above: Broccoli, above, in our washing station sink.